BP prize for old flesh and fowl art

A portrait of six-and-a-half presidents of the British Academy and a very dead chicken last night won the £25,000 BP Portrait prize, the most important British award for figurative art.

The prizes were presented last night by Jerry Hall, the model who famously has been the subject of many portraits, including one by Lucian Freud showing her nude and pregnant with her youngest child.

The winning artist, Stuart Pearson Wright, born in 1975, said his upbringing in Eastbourne, East Sussex, where he still lives, gave him a great interest in painting old people.

The commission for a formal portrait, showing the incumbent president and five living, former presidents of the academy - known also as The National Academy for the Humanities and the Social Sciences - was a highly unusual one for a young artist.

Charles Saumarez Smith, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, in London, called the win "astounding". The painting caused consternation at the academy as it was unveiled last year.

The academy's president, Sir Tony Wrigley, was evidently prepared to weather being portrayed as a Christ figure at the Last Supper, holding a Jammy Dodger biscuit instead of a loaf of bread, with the halo of the London Eye big wheel rising above his sholder. However he and his eminent peers, Lord Quirk, Sir Anthony Kenny, Sir Kenneth Dover, Sir Keith Thomas and the Reverend Owen Chadwick, were utterly dismayed at the dead chicken in their midst.

It did not help when the artist explained that he had wanted for years to include a dead chicken in a portrait. "Their soft wrinkled flesh reminds me so much of an old person's skin," he explained, adding that it also served as an intimation of mortality.

Even the artist admits that the only person in the picture looking really happy is Sir Kenneth in his red woolly pully: this is because the sitter was comfortable in his own armchair at home in St Andrews - the artist had to fly there to sketch him, go back to London to arrange the canvas, then return to Scotland in a transit van to paint him.

Mr Saumarez Smith described the portrait as "a hypnotic piece, full of sardonic humour, but also a work of high intelligence". He said it was amazingly brave and commendable of the academy to commission such a piece.

The joint second prize in the competition was shared by Phil Hale and Brendan Kelly, who won £4,000 each. The travel prize, of £2,000, was awarded to Alan Parker, for his proposal to document the day to day life of the Leicester police force: no dead chickens are expected.